A symphonic piece that equals the grandeur and the passion of the musical creations by the greatest masters. This is a story of a female musician in a male dominated world.

Secrets that weight down her soul, secrets she can’t speak of undermine her confidence, and her innate talent for music is in danger of running dry. Her father has just died of a heart attack and she is called back home at a convulse moment in her life. It’s unfinished because the final explosion of sound and passion ends abruptly and the silence leaves infinite outcomes to consider.Ĭatherine McKenna is a young Irish composer who is forced to face the baggage she’s been carrying with her since she was a child in an overly oppressive religious environment. The second contrasting the first one, full of sound and dance in vivid motion angst and inner rage ending in a grand finale that is blazing and fast paced, a triumph of the human will over tragedy and depression. Two movements, with differentiated themes and moods, the first one meditative, personal and slow moving. He doesn’t use his profound insight and compassion to dazzle, but to illuminate…Grace Notes is a small masterpiece… resonant, lovely, true.The best way to describe this novel is to declare it an unfinished symphony. “There are some writers – William Trevor is one, Alice Munro another – who are so accurate, so subtle, that you are hardly aware of reading them at all … MacLaverty is in the same mould.: there are no pyrotechnics here, no conjuror’s tricks. John Burnside, Scotsman Books of the Year 'Grace Notes should have won the Booker Prize – and deservedly won the Saltire – for its quiet beauty and breadth of vision” 'Grace Notes is one of the most insightful and powerful modern novels from a woman's perspective I've read by any author, male or female.' Through it all she strives to maintain the habit of art, in the face of depression, privation and misunderstanding. And in her home town in Northern Ireland she returns to bury a difficult father, forge a tentative peace with her mother and confront the ghosts of a constricting past. In Glasgow she gives birth to a child - and receives a career-making BBC commission. On the remote island of Islay she struggles for her artistic life in the midst of a relationship gone dangerously wrong. This is part of the life of Catherine McKenna - estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother and a woman composer making her mark in a male dominated field.

Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty